How To Start A Business With $49.87 And 1 Hour (Our 6-week experiment, week 3)

At some point or another, whether you’re a serial entrepreneur, dissatisfied with your desk job, or hoping to just generate some fooling around money, everyone has a business idea.

Most of them don’t go anywhere. Sometimes it’s because they’re just not very good ideas, but too often it’s because people are daunted by the prospect of the investment it takes to start up a business.

The truth is, these days the idea that there are too many hurdles to turning an idea into a company is no excuse.

We’re trying to grow a business using nothing but the power of Facebook marketing, and we wanted to write a post showing our work. How easy is it to start a business? We set up King’s County Threads in less than a day, for the whopping sum of $49.87.

Before we return to the details of actually marketing our company on Facebook, we wanted to show, step by step, dollar by dollar, how straightforward it was to go from spitballing ideas to putting a fully realized product in front of our audience. Next week, we’ll be back with the results of our first few ad campaigns and all the juicy details on how we chose to iterate on our campaign.

What Should We Sell?

We had a few basic criteria for our business. It needed to be something that was easy to create, had minimal upfront costs, and wouldn’t need much upkeep. Most important, it needed to be something we could get excited about.

We decided a t-shirt business was perfect for our experiment. T-shirts are an almost universally popular way to say you care about something, whether it’s your favorite band, your favorite animal, or not caring very much at all.

There’s a ton of evidence that people can grow a clever t-shirt idea into a profitable e-commerce company, and almost all the physical logistics—printing, packaging, and shipping—can be outsourced at a low cost.

The right t-shirt idea can be super successful, but there are plenty of unoriginal, unsuccessful t-shirt companies out there too. Shopify notes that there are two keys to a successful t-shirt company: finding the right niche, and getting the right design. The more targeted and specific an audience for a t-shirt, the better the chances of its success. That seemed like a perfect chance to test out our idea of finding an audience using Facebook’s targeting abilities.

But if we were going to make this work, we needed to find a great design that could resonate with a particular audience.

How We Came Up With Our First Shirt

Right around when we were planning our experiment, something happened in New York that I, as a resident New Yorker, cared very much about. It gave me an idea, an audience, and the inspiration to guide our first product.

New York’s L train, the only efficient way to get from trendy and busy North Brooklyn to downtown Manhattan, was going to shut down for essential repairs. It was going to take months, if not years for it to return.

All these headlines were pulled from Gothamist, one of New York’s most popular news sites. If you’re curious about what’s on the collective minds of the young and hip, it’s the first place you turn to. In case you can’t tell, it was on a lot of people’s minds.

Including me, the youngest and hippest of all!

As a New Yorker and regular L train rider, my commute might double or triple in length for a few years, and I wanted to let people know exactly how I felt. Then I thought about it some more, and I realized other people probably wanted to express how they felt too.

We had our idea for our very first t-shirt.

Not only was this something timely and important, but it gave us a clear, defined demographic base for our company. We’d target people living in and around the L train in Manhattan and Brooklyn with a shirt that combined a familiar slogan with the pressing issue of the moment.

And with that, King’s County Threads had its first product.

Setting Up The Store

We had an idea for our product, but we needed to find the most efficient way to sell it online. We were looking for options that would keep our costs down, were easy to use, and that would continue to grow with us if our business was a success.

Purchasing A Domain Name

You’re not going to get far with an e-commerce platform without a website. We had decided on our name, King’s County Threads (see below for why), so we used iwantmyname.com to quickly lock down our domain.

Choosing An E-Commerce Platform

E-commerce software is an amazing tool for ambitious entrepreneurs. It takes no time at all to set up a virtual store and start advertising your idea to the whole world.

There are plenty of e-commerce platforms to choose from, but we went with Shopify.

Shopify is the most popular e-commerce platform, and there were a few key reasons why it stood out from the crowd:

Shopify got our attention with some really effective content marketing. We were in the t-shirt business, and at least a few other entrepreneurs had shown how they used Shopify to start their own similar businesses on the platform’s blog.

Their interface was a lot more sophisticated and easy to use than some competitors. Other sites didn’t have some key features built in, like drop shipping, and just didn’t have the same professional feel.

Shopify also puts a premium on onboarding. It’s so easy to set up a shop that you might do it even before considering the competition.

On the front end, we were also impressed with the sites other entrepreneurs set up using Shopify—they looked like real websites! They also handle just about all of the back-end stuff, including taxes and webpage support, that you’d ordinarily have to deal with. In short, it’s a really well-managed customer experience.

Finally, Shopify’s integrations are easy to set up and incredibly useful. They have integrated, easy to use drop shipping through sites like Printful (more on that later), but they also integrate with apps like:

Those are the sort of tools businesses need to grow for the long term, and it was reassuring to know that Shopify wasn’t just thinking fly-by-night either, but putting businesses in a position to succeed.

Unlimited, $179/month: all the features of the pro plan, with more advanced analytics and the best discounts on shipping labels and credit card transactions.

We used Shopify’s Basic plan for $29/month. We wanted our own website and blog, so the Lite plan was out, but as a totally new company we didn’t yet need the more sophisticated analytics available on the larger plans.

Having a website would give our company, which had no name recognition, more credibility than a Facebook page alone. And it would let us take advantage of Facebook retargeting based on people who visited our site to improve our ads down the line.

Customizing Our Landing Page

We wanted our website to have as few barriers between the customer and the product as possible. If they clicked on our ad on Facebook, we want to immediately engage them and make it as simple as possible to purchase. That meant we wanted a homepage that would look great and show off our products.

Shopify has a ton of themes, free and paid, for their websites. We went with the “Boundless” theme. It’s simple, free, and looks great on desktop or mobile, which is key since we’ll advertise to consumers on different devices.

If you’re going to make a big visual first impression, like this theme does, you need to find some great images. Unsplash has free, high-resolution stock photography available for commercial use. We used it to fill out our background with a dynamic slideshow of some gorgeous pictures of New York.

There are only two pages on kingscountythreads.com: a homepage and a blog page. We limited options and put all our products below the fold of the home page so that there was no way for people to miss our product.

Key Takeaways

Here are some things to consider if you’re looking to start your own e-commerce business:

Spend a little time figuring out the platform that’s right for you, because it’s going to be difficult to move stores if you figure out that a competitor has the features you want—Shopify, for instance, will delete your store if you leave, and that data will not be accessible to you afterwards.

If you’re using an e-commerce platform, then don’t waste money on a hosting solution. Go through a domain name provider like iwantmyname so that you’re not paying for anything you don’t need.

What is your choice of platform like for the end-user? Whichever you choose, browse around and look at some examples of stores on it. Would you want to spend your money there?

Make sure that your site radiates safety. SSL protection is an absolute minimum—you’ll know you have it when the lock in Google Chrome’s address bar is green. Shopify offers it as a default. This is absolutely crucial because when you first start a business, you have no reputation: you need every little indicator of safety you can get.

We set up our website for just under $40. Even better, it cost us nothing to find a great looking theme and beautiful pictures to really make it look professional.

Designing Our Product

We had an idea and a website. Now we just needed to give people something to buy.

One of the best things about Shopify is its easy integration with other apps. From the Shopify App Dashboard, you’re literally a click away from invaluable tools to set up your business. That led us to Printful, a custom printing service, which combined a lot of advantages all in one platform:

They had an easy to use mockup generator where we could design our shirts.

They do drop shipping, so there’s no need for printing and shipping on our end. Whenever someone buys our shirt from Shopify, Printful will print and ship it directly to the customer, with no extra work on our end.

There are no upfront costs—they only take a cut when we make a sale.

We could take our idea, design our shirt, and sell them without ever having to print or ship anything ourselves.

Making A T-Shirt A (Virtual) Reality

Printful’s generator takes all the guesswork out of designing consumer products, from t-shirts to posters to pillows.

We had a few t-shirt styles to choose from. We went with the Anvil brand, for two reasons:

We can add inside label printing to our shirts, so we get to stay on-brand.

They were affordable. We’re not selling luxury t-shirts, but we still wanted our customers to receive a quality, comfortable piece of clothing.

Once we chose our shirt style, time to add our design.

We feel good about our idea, and pretty good about our ability to sell it, but we’re not artists. To find a logo for our shirt, we went to the Noun Project, which has thousands of logos and symbols available royalty-free for a couple dollars apiece.

We wanted something relevant to our L train riding audience, and luckily they had plenty of trains to choose from.

In the end, we chose one that closely resembled an NYC subway car. We then used Pixlr to mock up the image with our chosen text (“Keep me calm and don’t shut down the L train”) and to make the background transparent.

Then we could easily upload our image in Printful’s generator and visualize our product.

Of course, you probably won’t get the mockup right on the first try. We certainly didn’t. Re-adjust in Pixlr or your photo editor of choice until it looks exactly right, because you don’t want to ship out a bunch of bad product.

But even though it took up a bit of time, getting our product actually up on the store cost us nothing upfront.

Pricing Our Product

Printful sells each of their shirt brands for different prices. The basic Anvil 980 T-Shirt, which we used for L Train design, is $13.50 (and $1.50 more for each size above 2XL).

We decided to sell our first t-shirt for $17.99 each. We reached that number for a few reasons:

Selling our t-shirts for $17.99 instead of a flat $18 takes advantage of the “left-digit effect” the phenomenon you see everywhere where your brain recognizes a dollar as substantially more than 99 cents.

We could earn a profit on each shirt, $4.49 on regular sizes, down to $1.49 for 3XL size shirts.

Going forward, we’re pricing other shirts at different prices, either slightly above or below our initial price point. We’re hoping to learn a bit more about our customer pricing preferences and see if there’s a better price that would lead to more sales.

Key Takeaways

Here are some key things to remember when designing your t-shirt:

Design is important, especially in the early days when you’re trying to distinguish yourself. But if you don’t have the money to hire designers, resources like The Noun Project and Pixlr can be enough to get you past the generic presets of whatever commerce platform you go with.

Don’t just pick a material to design on without looking up reviews. We went with Anvil because we’d read reviews saying it was a good value for the money—not as expensive as American Apparel and not as cheap as some of the other brands available.

You need really high-res images when you’re trying to design shirts. The Noun Project’s images come as SVG files, which can scale up to any size you want. If you’re looking for other kinds of images, you can start with Wikimedia Commons and their Large Images section or the New York Public Library’s collection. But be extremely careful to make sure the images you’re using are free for commercial use, i.e. public domain: many aren’t.

That put our total for starting a business and designing our first shirt at just over 40 dollars. Even better, we’d done it in less than a day.

Marketing King’s County Threads

We had our store, and we had our t-shirt. But if we were going to make this a success, we needed to take the last steps by laying the groundwork for our Facebook marketing experiment.

First, that meant designing and planning out our company brand. We had our first t-shirt, but we needed to think about branding our company to start creating customer loyalty. And we needed to actually link up our page with Facebook so we could start our experiment.

Branding Our Company

What does King’s County Threads, the name of our brand new company, have to do with New York, or our t-shirt? Fun history and geography fact for all you marketers: King’s County is the county name for Brooklyn, New York. Plus, it sounds cool.

We wanted a logo that we could use on our website, shipping, and tags. While we were choosing an icon for our first-shirt, we also browsed the Noun Project for our company logo. Keeping with our transportation in New York theme, we chose this snazzy taxi.

We still needed to put our own spin on it. Using the Hipster Logo Generator, we came up with a font that matched our ethos—hip and to the point.

Finally, we chose one more logo for our website itself—mostly just because we liked it. It never hurts to have a little piece of intangible branding to set your business apart, something that marks you as different with an inscrutable kind of charm.

The grand total was $5.97 for our logos, and $5 for our font. For less than $11 dollars, we had a distinctive styling that would make our new company stand out. We eventually left the taxi and the Hipster Logo out of our final store, but they were essential to us discovering a more coherent style later on, and these tools are incredibly helpful for getting you to that initial mockup phase.

Creating Content

As we said above, there are two pages on the website. We’re primarily focused on growing our customer base through Facebook ads, but devoting a little extra time to our blog might not only grow a new stream of visitors to our site, it could improve our Facebook marketing too.

Since we’re building a shirt line around a major New York event, the imminent shutdown of a major public transportation line, we plan to write posts around that and other interesting New York-related transportation stories and share them around.

If we get enough unique visitors through our blog, we can retarget to similar people on Facebook, building up a new potential audience of people who feel passionate about anything related to planes, trains, or automobiles in New York.

We’d made our biggest upfront purchase, but we had our very own store up and running. So far, we’d spent $38.90 on our burgeoning business.

Integrating With Facebook

Setting up a Facebook page is straightforward. From your profile page, navigate to the tab at the top of the screen:

Choose your organization type:

And fill in your details:

Once you create your page, you can sync it with Shopify directly from the Shopify dashboard.

And with that, you’re ready to start selling.

One important thing to note is that you can choose whether you advertise your products on your Facebook page and website, or on your website alone. If you want to sell in both places, be sure to enable your Facebook shop on the Shopify account page.

With that, we had everything we needed to start actually putting our product in front of people. And you know what that means—yep, next week we’ll have the first round of results from our experiment in Facebook ads, and we’ll go over what we did to try and improve upon our efforts.

Key Takeaways

For marketing your company, here are things to remember:

Make sure you’re syncing up your Facebook page with your store page if you’re using Facebook ads. People are going to click through to your Facebook page when you show them ads, so are they going to find anything interesting there or not? You should have your products for sale there as well as any blog content that you’ve put up on your store.

Content marketing can be an amazing tool for building a business. Write posts that show you care about the space you’re in, and you can advertise them to your customers alongside your products. When people start reading, they start developing trust for your brand, and then they’re more likely to buy.

Shopify has made it quite hard to start a blog for a long time. Fortunately, there are extensions out there like BlogFeeder that will let yousync and import a blogfrom WordPress or Tumblr, so you can write your posts elsewhere and automatically upload them to your shop.

We were ready to begin our experiment. In sum, here were our total business costs:

Now, the Real Challenge Begins

Setting up your own business used to required a significant commitment. We were able to go from idea to business for less than 50 dollars in only a couple of hours, with no physical commitment. If you’re toying with the idea to sell a physical product, odds are it’s as easy for you as it was for us to get started.

With basically no barriers to entry, we can focus our time and money on marketing our shirts. In our next few posts, we’ll show you how our marketing experiment unfolds and share what we learn along the way.

In the meantime, if you’ve had an idea for a business and weren’t sure how to go about it, by the time you read our next post you could already be coming up with your own marketing plan for your own product.

Comments

How refreshing to find an informative ‘how to’ article written in the first person by someone who is not flogging something and is willing to share and explain everything.
Too many other sites end up sounding like ‘blah blah blah’ after the first paragraph however your article was crystal clear, to the point and gave me the confidence to attempt it myself.
I thank you sincerely.

Great question. You probably don’t want to show your customers your exact profit margin on a product, but we did so because we don’t consider y’all our customers–we want to show you everything so you can learn as much as possible about Facebook ads from this experiment 🙂

I’m very curious, how you managed to get Sopify for $29 per month. Because when you first open Shopify you have the priceplans of $9, $29, $79 and $129. But as soon as you create your store you can only choose from priceplans $9, $59 and $159.

$29 is the standard price for Shopify, like this article says, and there are also $79 and $179. I don’t know where you got the numbers $59, $129, and $159, because a quick glance at their pricing page will show they have no plans with those prices.

Also, the pricing does not change after you create an account. You can move up or down to another plan whenever you want.